Re: World English (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

----- Original Message ----
From: "<deinx nxtxr>" <deinx.nxtxr@...>
Those were different times...

I hold that it's nothing but naive (and ultimately dangerous) ethnocentrism to
think that 21st United States society is so special in such a way that it will
persist for so long that it will eradicate all the other languages in the
world, when numerous other cultures experienced a period of near globalization
(within the contemporaneous concept of "global"), only to eventually subside.
We're already showing the signs of cultural age that lead to eventual demise,
and we're nowhere near as old as Rome was when it finally subsided. Cultures
come and go. I find it arrogant to assume that we will be any different.

Besides, native languages survive within empires. British influence in its heyday was
very significant in India, for instance, and yet while English remains a
powerful language in India today, the native languages survived, enough to
drive a successful push to rename Bombay back to Mumbai. Even though the Middle
East was firmly ensconced within the Roman Empire, the Semitic languages
survived, with the New Testament being written largely in Aramaic. The Soviets
even made a concentrated effort to stamp out everything but Russian, with no
success.

I think you're assuming that the only real purpose of language is communication.
Were that so, we'd have settled on a global language years ago. Latin,
possibly, if not Greek (or Egyptian, or Sumerian). A lingua franca of the past
would have taken hold. English certainly isn't the first language to have a go
at that. But language has several other purposes that are at odds with
linguistic globalization. For one thing, people have a great deal of pride in
their native languages (that's what helped Ukrainian and other languages
survive the Soviet Union, for instance). For another, as many people on this
list know perhaps better than others, there's value in having a communication
system that has "in group" and "out group" member identification (in some cases
on this list, "in group" is one person :D ).

After all, most of the European languages came from the same source. If language
were only about communication, then we wouldn't have deviated so dramatically
from that source that those languages are mutually unintelligible today. Sure,
separated by space, we would have come up with different words for things that
came along after the split, but the grammar wouldn't have changed, and the
words for things we univerally had (like, say, water: Wasser, eau, agua, aqua)
wouldn't have, either.

We will never get to the point on this planet where there is but a single
language spoken, not until we get to the point where there is but a single
being capable of communication.

-- Paul

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